How Does Your Agile Compare to Your Competition?

A lot of times teams and organizations would like to evaluate their way of working with their competition. They would like to focus on their areas of improvement and incorporate feedback to do better. Comparative Agility assessment is an assessment tool which suggests that the results would help guide the organizations in planning the next set of Agile initiatives.

It took me awhile, but I eventually realized the flaws in my thinking. A business does not need to be perfect; it needs only to be better than (and stay ahead of) its competition. Google is the dominant search engine today not because the results it shows are perfect but because its results are usually better than those shown by its competition.

Thus, being more agile than one’s competitors is indicative of the organization’s ability to deliver better products. This led Kenny Rubin, Laurie Williams and Mike Cohn to create the Comparative Agility assessment (CA). When a survey is taken, the survey responses are compared against the entire database and an organization can compare against similar organizations. For example, a team can compare against all teams doing web development, all companies that are about six months into their agile adoption efforts etc.

CA approach assesses agility on seven dimensions:

Teamwork

Requirements

Planning

Technical practices

Quality

Culture

Knowledge creation

Currently, there is a database of 1123 surveys and you can register to take the survey. The survey is meant to be completed by an experienced ScrumMaster, coach, or consultant on behalf of a team or company based on interviews or observation.

It's important to compare with your competitors in order to know where your position is. This comparison should also make you understand which are the results you have to archive and where your company should be improved. Also a manager can compare the stuff within a company.